"Shag A Gamer" Cuts to the Chase

A new U.K. dating site makes it easier than ever for gamers to get some online action.

Shag A Gamer is not a dating site. Dating sites, in theory at least, are for people looking for dates. Shag A Gamer is for people who want to shag. And "shag," as anyone who's ever watched an Austin Powers movie can tell you, is an English colloquialism for doing the nasty. The horizontal mambo. Chesterfield rugby. Playing hide the pickle. Taking ol' One-Eye to the optometrist. Riding the skin boat to Tuna Town.

I'm talking about bumping uglies, people. I'm talking about sex.

Shag A Gamer was launched by the same people who founded Date A Gamer, after they noticed that a lot of members were using the site for drive-by banging rather than actual dating. "It got us thinking that, perhaps by providing a platform where geeks and gamers over the age of 18 could arrange to meet up and get it on, we could help people who may feel uneasy in social situations, find someone and get some action," Date A Gamer boss Tom Thurlow told Eurogamer. "People were using the Date a Gamer site to meet up for sex anyway, but this way they have a space where they can do this more openly in an arena they are comfortable in, in other words, online."

"We're all adults and by using this platform all members know what they are there for and the activity is far more transparent," he added.

That actually sounds pretty reasonable - "gamers get urges too," as Thurlow put it - but I'm not sure what benefit there is in targeting "gamers" beyond a certain degree of market differentiation. Not that the gamer demographic is particularly well defined for either shagging or dating; Thurlow acknowledged that the Date A Gamer database was built using a site called "Global Personals" that scans the rosters of existing dating sites for members who express specific interests in "computers" and "computer gaming." The Shag A Gamer database will be bulked up the same way, he said, but limited to those who also express a desire for "no-strings rendezvous."

But this kind of fun doesn't come cheaply. Browsing is free, and yes, I browsed - hey, gamers get urges too - but to be able to actually interact with anyone costs £19.95 ($31.20) per month, or £90 ($141) for a year. I don't have any experience in the economics of this sort of thing, but that sounds like an awful lot of money just to be able to fire off a few dirty IMs to random people on the internet.